BI refers to computer-based techniques used in identifying, extracting and analyzing business data, such as sales revenue by products and/or departments, or by associated costs and incomes. BI technologies provide historical, current and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of BI technologies are reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, and predictive analytics. BI aims to support better business decision-making. Thus a BI system can be called a decision support system.
BI reporting is a common function used in visually presenting business data for business decision making. Typically, a report consists of data that a BI user is interested in. The data in the report is typically static, and when the BI user modifies the presented data, the updated data is presented in a new page without keeping track of the previous state of the data. Thus, by performing actions on the data such as “sort”, “expand”, “collapse”, etc., the updated report data is typically given in a new screen without a transition state. A transition state might help the BI user in tracking what changes to the data has been done. There is a need for visually tracking the data changes in report documents.